Words affect all of us differently. As you read this prayer, read with generosity, and consider which images and words speak to you, and which make you bristle. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing in the “Comments” section, please use that space to expand upon an image or word from the prayer that resonated with you, or that you felt was missing, and write an expansive prayer of your own.
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Mother of glory, may give me a spirit of wisdom and revelation as I come to know her, so that, with the eyes and ears of my heart enlightened, I may know what is the hope, what is the joy to which she has called me and what are the riches of her glorious legacy among the saints.
My name is Hannah Joy Bergstrom de Leon. I currently attend Luther Seminary with the hope of becoming an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I am in my second year and have been working with a group of students to encourage and challenge our community to use more expansive language for God, acknowledging and embracing the vastness and mystery of the Trinity. Aboveis a simple prayer I used this past summer during my silent retreat. It has been adapted from Ephesians 1:17-18.
Using this prayer daily broke my internalized understanding of God wide open. In using Mother and feminine pronouns, God was revealed anew. This language embodied God, breathed out God and she was just as real, just as true, and just as honest as the God witnessed to using Father and masculine language. This prayer became the prayer that cracked me open, calling me, calling us to open ourselves up to the expansiveness of who God is and know her, him, it…in new and penetrating ways.
New Church of Montgomery, in Glendale 